The Tale of Terror eBook

to stories of the occult and the uncanny. Algernon
Blackwood is one of the most ingenious exponents of
this type of story. By means of psychical explanations,
he succeeds in revivifying many ancient superstitions.
In Dr. John Silence, even the werewolf, whom
we believed extinct, manifests himself in modern days
among a party of cheerful campers on a lonely island,
and brings unspeakable terror in his trail. Sometimes
terror is used nowadays, as Bulwer Lytton used it,
to serve a moral purpose. Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray is intended to show
that sin must ultimately affect the soul; and the Sorrows
of Satan, in Miss Corelli’s novel, are caused
by the wickedness of the world. But apart from
any ulterior motive there is still a desire for the
unusual, there is still pleasure to be found in a
thrill, and so long as this human instinct endures
devices will be found for satisfying it. Of the
making of tales of terror there is no end; and almost
every novelist of note has, at one time or another,
tried his hand at the art. Early in his career
Arnold Bennett fashioned a novelette, Hugo,
which may be read as a modernised version of the Gothic
romance. Instead of subterranean vaults in a
deserted abbey, we have the strong rooms of an enterprising
Sloane Street emporium. The coffin, containing
an image of the heroine, is buried not in a mouldering
chapel, but in a suburban cemetery. The lovely
but harassed heroine has fallen, indeed, from her
high estate, for Camilla earns her living as a milliner.
There are, it is true, no sonnets and no sunsets,
but the excitement of the plot, which is partially
unfolded by means of a phonographic record, renders
them superfluous. H.G. Wells makes excursions
into quasi-scientific, fantastic realms of grotesque
horror in his First Men in the Moon, and in
some of his sketches and short stories. Joseph
Conrad has the power of fear ever at the command of
his romantic imagination. In The Nigger of
the Narcissus, in Typhoon, and, above all,
in The Shadow-Line, he shows his supreme mastery
over inexpressible mystery and nameless terror.
The voyage of the schooner, doomed by the evil influence
of her dead captain, is comparable only in awe and
horror to that of The Ancient Mariner.
Conrad touches unfathomable depths of human feelings,
and in his hands the tale of terror becomes a finished
work of art. The future of the tale of terror
it is impossible to predict; but the experiments of
living authors, who continually find new outlets with
the advance of science and of psychological enquiry,
suffice to prove that its powers are not yet exhausted.
Those who make the ‘moving accident’ their
trade will no doubt continue to assail us with the
shock of startling and sensational events. Others
with more insidious art, will set themselves to devise
stories which evoke subtler refinements of fear.
The interest has already been transferred from ‘bogle-wark’
to the effect of the inexplicable, the mysterious
and the uncanny on human thought and emotion.
It may well be that this track will lead us into unexplored
labyrinths of terror.